zlacker

Real != profitable. Google can offer academic style oppurtunities at industry style salaries.

Eg. Fuchsia OS might have been started because Google saw a bussines oppurtunity in writing an open source capabilities OS. Or, it might have been started to keep smart OS engineers from leaving the company.

>>gizmo6+(OP)
It seems fairly ridiculous to suggest that Fuchsia is not a real project. It wouldn't be the first OS Google has built.

>>KirinD+R3
What are the others? Android and ChromeOS are both built on the Linux kernel.

>>floren+gc
Not just Linux, but ChromeOS is based on Gentoo Linux (originally Ubuntu); which is to say, much of the userspace stack was pre-exsting as well. The core of the operating system is the Chrome web browser, which was also a pre-exsting project, which a relatively clear business interest to Google (influence over the web platform).

Android has a bit of a better claim, as more of the userspace stack was written for it. It also wasn't started by Google (although they bought Android Inc. years before it was released publicly).

>>floren+gc
They're entirely alternative binary arches with a bunch of patches.

The idea it's just a Linux flavor is sort of like saying iOS is "just a build of OSX". I.e., gross simplification.